Matthew Yglesias discusses a study finding that
if Fox News hadn’t existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008. Without Fox, in other words, the GOP’s only popular vote win since the 1980s would have been reversed and the 2008 election would have been an extinction-level landslide. And that’s only measuring the direct impact of the Fox cable network. If you consider the supplemental effect of Sinclair’s local news broadcast, the AM radio shows of Fox personalities like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, and the broader constellation of right-wing punditry, the effect would surely be larger.
Yglesias sees this as the nefarious effect of a “hack gap” between the Right and the Left. Even taking the study at face value, though, it would be fairer to say this is what the Right can achieve when it sets up parallel institutions to balance out the left-wing bias in the “mainstream” media. You don’t have to be thrilled with everything Fox News airs or the incentives it creates among rising conservative pundits — or even watch cable news at all; I don’t — to understand why it exists, and why something like it was necessary.
In short, the counterfactual the study considers, a world without Fox News, isn’t an unbiased media environment. It’s a world where everyone gets their news from liberals.
A few years back Tim Groseclose estimated that in the absence of media bias, the electorate would shift markedly rightward. His precise estimates have been disputed, naturally, but whatever the total effect, he clearly got the overall direction of the media’s bias correct. So it’s rather rich for liberals to complain that the deck is stacked against them in the press.